One privileged voice can control a marginalized community’s sacred narrative

Evidence

Put simply, Rushdie had the power to shape the public narrative of Islam in a manner that British Muslims themselves did not. Ironically, in his recently published memoir Rushdie comments on the difficulty of controlling how a story is told: “At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses … behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?” Rushdie’s answer to these questions is that “everyone and anyone has, or should have that power,” and yet the Rushdie Affair is a prime example of the unequal distribution of this power. Rushdie’s novel demonstrates how one person can have control over the most sacred stories of a marginalized religious community in Britain. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 356

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends Said’s Orientalism thesis about who gets to represent Islam; ties to the reading purpose on narrative control in Islamophobia. — connects to: The demand that minorities speak for their whole community reinforces their marginality; Minority cultural works are pressured to speak for their entire community; Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The demand that minorities speak for their whole community reinforces their marginality #expands (0.70)
• Minority cultural works are pressured to speak for their entire community #expands (0.65)
• Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants #expands (0.60)
• Community leaders police Muslim behavior to protect reputational standing #exemplifies (0.60)
• Hallucinated protective voices parallel the colonized creating a national voice #complicates (0.50)